A Fistful of Dynamite aka Duck You Suckers (seen on DVD)

I discovered director Sergio Leone’s films in the early nineties in a small town in the Fiji Islands called Lautoka. I was working in the local sugar mill, as an engineer, living in the mill grounds (which were very tropical and very beautiful) in the Bachelor’s Quarters (a large and lovely British colonial building). There wasn’t much to do outside work, except get drunk and get stoned in the ganja (marijuana) grown in the cane fields.

One of the few activities outside substance abuse was movies. There were two cinemas, both dives but I went there a lot anyway. In between, I watched things on a 17” Sony Triniton TV and VCR, that I bought brand new (I was quite staggered by my extravagance).

One of the problems with watching movies on TV (aside from the tiny screen) was the poor quality of videos. By the early nineties, most videos available in Fiji were pirated usually through video cameras taken into cinemas. This was one reason why I visited the ratty cinemas. The only films available in original transfers were older ones mastered in the mid to late eighties. Even these looked pretty bad due to use they had got over the years.

As a result, I ended up seeing films I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with. In those days, I was disinterested in certain genres like Horror, Gangster Movies and Westerns find their violence dull repetitive and unpleasant. For me a fight sequence was like a pointless song and dance number in a Bollywood film- In there for its own gratuitous sake and nothing else. Therefore I hired Leones “Once Upon a Time in America” from the video store without much expectation of doing much more than a brief look.

The print of “Once Upon a Time..” was great, almost overcoming the limitations of my small TV. People hadn’t bothered to hire it out much. It also blew me away, even though it was 4 hours long and I had trouble following the film. It has a very complex structure set in 3 time periods between which it moves fluidly, often in single take. I was also distracted and mesmerised by the sheer physical beauty of the film and Ennio Morricone glorious score.

What struck about Leone’s film was that while it had all the trappings of a gangster film, it was not really a film about gangsters. It was a film about friendship and betrayal and I realised for the first time, what it was for a film to transcend its genre.

It was 12 years before I saw a Leone film again- and it was the same one. “Once Upon a Time in America” on DVD seen on a plasma TV, won in an American Express competition. I looked Leone up and discovered that he had done a lot of spaghetti westerns and I was disappointed. I had seen a few spaghetti westerns in my teens and hated them.

Still I bought “Once Upon a Time in the West” when it came out on DVD and again I was blown away. The film begins with a group of thugs waiting at a train station for a train. Just this event is shown in real time for over10 minutes, with no score except natural sounds designed by Morricone. My flatmate couldn’t take it and left declaring it to be the worst film he had ever seen. Five years later, he still expresses outrage for having sat through those 10 minutes.

Since then I have watched Leone films as they appeared on DVD and they have continued to surprise me. All his films transcend their genre by their themes, which though powerful and epic, are so well integrated in the films that one is barely aware of them. An example of this is the “War is bad” theme in “The Good, The Bad, The Ugly” illustrated by a wordless scene where Clint Eastwood offers a dying solider, barely out of his teens, a cigarette.

Don’t have dinner while watching this film, as I did as it starts on an extreme close up of a torrent of pee drowning ants. It sets the tone for what is a very provocative film.

The film, set in Mexico in the early twentieth century, begins with a peasant hitching a ride in stage coach of rich passengers, who while initially outrage by the intrusion decide to make sport of him. They ask him, if he knows how many children he has had, how many children his mother has had, if he knew his age or his father, of deriding his intelligence. He reacts with all the intelligence of a cow. The highlight of this abuse, which goes on and on, is a monologue by a fearsomely prim lady, who claims to know all about these peasants, the lot of them squeezed into a small room, and when the light goes out they reach to, mother, sister, brother, goat, her voice trembling with the lasciviousness of it all.

The peasant, Juan, turns out to be bandit and very efficiently and brutally robs the whole coach with his gang composed mainly of kids he has had with different women.

There is nothing glamorous about Leone’s peasants. You can almost smell their stink, they look so disgusting, conforming in many ways to stereotypes the coach passengers have fun with, but don’t in other ways.

In Leone’s world the concept of right and wrong has almost no meaning. This is particularly evident in Juan’s rape of the prim lady. We don’t see actual rape, so we don’t know how she reacted. But she certainly went in heat, as she described the peasant orgy, and the impression left is, she probably enjoyed it. She definitely didn’t enjoy being stuck in cart, nude, with all the other male passengers, also nude, and then tipped into a pig sty.

These peasants while extremely downtrodden, aren’t noble but given their circumstances what else can they but extremely brutish.

Juan’s lifes ambition is to rob a bank in a city called Mesa Verde, which looks like coming to fruition when he meets a dynamite expert, Sean an ex-IRA “terrorist”. Sean manipulates Juan to become involved in a revolution.

Leone’s films are dense with plot, but such care is given to characters and their environment, that for the time you are watching the film, you are completely hooked.

In many ways this has got to be one of Leones strangest work. The camera work of the Mexican Sequences are simply “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Ben Hur” epic, yet it seems to have a cartoonish and low budget sensibility at the same time. Ennio Morricone, uses classical music as was used in cartoons to underline specific moments. This approach ensures the film doesn’t come across as self-important (it does open with a quote from Chairman Mao).

This is the third Leone Western I have seen, the others being “Once Upon a Time in The West” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. After seeing “A Fistful of Dynamite”, I can’t wait to get the others, yet to be seen..